Beyond Digitization: The Need for Inclusive Co-Governance in Reforming Indian Land Administration

Across the Global South, heightened contestation over rural land has placed land administration at the centre of policy debates, particularly where mismatches between official land records and lived realities generate disputes, exclusion, and limited access to welfare and compensation. In India, these challenges are shaped by colonial cadastral legacies, fragmented institutional arrangements, and rapidly changing rural and peri-urban landscapes. While digitization of land records is widely promoted as a solution to improve transparency and efficiency, reforms implemented without meaningful community participation risk reproducing existing inequalities in more rigid and legally entrenched forms. This article examines the limits of digitization-led land reforms in India and explores how decentralized and community-engaged governance approaches can strengthen land administration. Focusing on two case-study regions in Western India—Talasari and Chiplun in Maharashtra—the study draws on qualitative field research conducted between December 2024 and October 2025, including Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), Key Informant Interviews (KIIs), institutional process-mapping, and analysis of land administration procedures across multiple departments. The combination of field-based evidence and process-mapping enables a grounded analysis of institutional coordination, governance bottlenecks, and the relationship between formal land records and customary tenure practices. The findings show that digitization without community-engaged implementation processes often reproduces inaccuracies and governance gaps rather than resolving longstanding structural problems. Outdated cadastral records, fragmented institutional arrangements, and weak coordination between departments continue to intensify exclusions, tenure insecurity, and administrative fragmentation. The article therefore argues that strengthening land governance requires hybrid and decentralized approaches that integrate statutory and customary systems through co-governance and community participation. These findings have important policy implications for ongoing reforms such as the Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme (DILRMP) and the Survey of Villages and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas (SVAMITVA), highlighting the need to align digitization initiatives with local tenure realities, participatory governance, and stronger institutional coordination.